Hakuna Matata

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Porta vita

So I’m sitting here in my least favorite class of all time and I look around to see what the rest of the people in my class are doing. All three of the others here. Because it’s not just me that knew this professor was terrible. But everyone else was intelligent and avoided this class like the plague. Except the four of us. Go us. So anyway, I normally don’t pay half a mind to the other people in my class. Flash back to high school: we’re eating at Subway and Dora points out Tyrell. I’ve never seen Tyrell in my life. I ask Dora who this Tyrell character is and she looks at me in disbelief. “He’s in our calc class!” Nope! Never seen him. Not ringing a bell. I have a pretty weird memory though so I ask her where he sits. The following conversation ensued:

“Behind Danny.”
“Who??!!” Needless to say, I’ve no idea who Danny is. I was hoping Dora would give me a “4th row, 3rd seat” kind of reply but no. I think she considered it after I asked who Danny was but decided to see how far she could go to find someone I actually knew of.
“Danny’s behind Katie.” (Ok, some of the names are random- I didn’t know who they were then, I definitely don’t remember them now!!)
“There’s a Katie in our class?”
“She sits next to David!!!”
“And I would know of David because…?”
“I’ve seen you talking to him!!! He sits behind Sam!”
“Who’s Sam?”
“REALLY?? You sit next to him!”

Yeah. As you can see, go me with the knowing people in my class. But I digress. In a class of four, we’ve bonded over our hatred of our prof- funny how that works, no? So Simon is chilling in the 2nd row, passed out. His tongue is even kinda sticking out and I wouldn’t be surprised if he started snoring soon. Matt is staring at his phone- I think he’s playing a game or something, but at least he’s trying to be discreet. Adam’s over here just staring down our prof. He’s not taking notes or anything, he’s just glaring at him. Almost like he’s attempting to destroy the man with his mind. Amusing. Me? I’m blatantly swiping away on my phone to write this. And our fearless leader? He’s giving a new meaning to death by powerpoint. Even though he doesn’t use powerpoint. There’s a whole bunch of stuff on the projector that he gave us ahead of time and is now reading it. Because obviously we can’t read. And heaven forbid you’re not sure how he got from line 3 to 4. Because it’s in the notes (WHERE??!!). And we don’t have time to go over every detail. That’s why we’re provided with the notes ahead of time. Jeez! I don’t know what any of us were thinking!

And wow. Our prof literally just said “and here’s the vector you get because you guys are too stupid to know what it is.” Yes. I love coming to this class for my triweekly (is that athing?) dose of verbal abuse. I just can’t get enough of it! At least this time he followed up with “Sorry, didn’t mean to insult your intelligence.” Ohhh really? Because at least once a week, he has no problem prefacing answers to questions with: “It’s obvious to a three year old… (or to a child of three- take your pick, he alternates)” or while reading to us the notes he created (that have more errors than any of us can count): “An idiot could tell you this will be…” but surely he doesn’t mean to insult us any of those times. And those are only two of the ones he uses on a daily basis! I really need to record these classes because the powers that be don’t seem to think there’s a problem with him. I mean, this is a 600 level class. I’m not saying it should be easy. I’m not even saying it shouldn’t require a good deal of work. But I could do without the slams to my “inability to understand basic concepts” whenever I ask a question.

I think I’m a fairly intelligent person. Sorry if that sounds obnoxious or conceited, I just don’t think I could have gotten this far (one more semester til I graduate with a masters in aerospace engineering!!!!!!) if i wasn’t. I even think this professor knows a lot about the subject. But if it’s evident from the homework and then the test that the entire class (ok, yes, there are only four of us, but I’ve had him before in a class of 30 and it was the same then) doesn’t understand something, then it’s not obvious!! And I’m sorry, I don’t know WHAT three-year-old children he interacts with, but I can’t tell you of any that understand matrix operations, let alone tensors or understanding the finite element application of isoparametric quadrilaterals! But maybe that’s just me (and in case you were wondering, we are now 50 minutes into the class and he has said on 6 separate occasions his bit about the human of 3). I love this class so much.

End rant. It’s several hours later and I’m about to eat dinner with one of my best friends. I wasn’t intending on posting about my favorite professor today but the moment was too perfect! I WAS however going to blog about the awesomeness of good friends and knowing that they’re always there for you. So I guess that’ll have to wait until another post. Thanks for reading my rant! Hopefully it’ll make you feel better about your professors OR you can share your horror stories!